Review: My Week With Marilyn

My Week With Marilyn star Michelle Williams doesn't look entirely like Marilyn Monroe, but she is so persuasive that you end up, as so many did, falling in love with the image.Photo by
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Michelle Williams delivers the essence of Marilyn Monroe in this romantic reminiscence of the time the actress made The Prince and the Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in 1956. It's based on the story of a young assistant (Eddie Redmayne) who escorted Marilyn Monroe around and fell for her, and while it seems idealized, it glitters.

Starring: Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne

Rating: Three and a half stars out of five

First love, someone says in the winning (if unlikely) reminiscence My Week With Marilyn, is a sweet despair. That's true, whether the object of one's affections is the girl next door or Marilyn Monroe.

It's both in this slight and likable fable -- based on a true story, or so it says -- that is set in London in 1956, as Marilyn is about to make the film The Prince and the Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier. It will turn out to be a clash of cultures: the Hollywood sex goddess and the Shakespearean stage icon never meshed, and they made a mediocre movie in the end. However, a young third assistant director (showbiz slang for "gofer") was around to escort Miss Monroe, fall in love with her, and conveniently overhear just about every confession made by the principals who felt they were being "devoured" by her (Monroe's new husband, Arthur Miller), worried that they were "dead behind these eyes" (Olivier) or were just looking for someone who would love her "like a regular girl" (guess who).

The result is a combination of romantic comedy, backstage gossip and, at the centre, a wonderfully detailed performance by Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe. Padded into something that only approaches the blond voluptuousness of the real thing, Williams captures her in the shy smiles and bewildered breakdowns that comprise her interaction with the outside world. Breathy, vulnerable, self-absorbed, lost, manipulative, childish and irresistible, she is a child who is being crushed by someone named "Marilyn Monroe."

Marilyn takes over the movie, but she starts as a bit player in the drama of Colin Clark (a likable turn by Eddie Redmayne), a young Oxford graduate seeking to make his way in the world. He ends up "running away with the circus," and joining the production company of Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), who is just about to direct and co-star in a light comedy with the American bombshell who had the reputation for being impossible.

Marilyn proves to be just that, impossible, as she arrives on the set with her personal coach Paula Strasberg (who, in Zoe Wanamaker's purposely irksome performance, was the biggest yenta in all of Method acting), and then hiding in her dressing room, afraid that she can't discover the "truth" in her character. She finds sympathy among some members of the troupe -- Dame Sybil Thorndike (the commanding Judi Dench) is grace itself -- but Olivier is soon at his wit's end. "Trying to teach Marilyn to act," he says at one point, "is like teaching Urdu to a badger."

The line trips easily off the tongue for Branagh, who looks little like Olivier, but manages to capture enough of his essence: one believes in the way he slides into Shakespearean quotation at moments of high stress ("Farewell to the tranquil mind. Farewell content") because Branagh himself seems like he would do much the same. It's a performance that is calibrated, like Olivier's in The Prince and the Showgirl, to play off against the curvaceous eroticism of his co-star.

Clark, who died in 2002, wrote two memoirs: the first was about the months making the movie and the second told about the special week that he spent with the star. In My Week With Marilyn, he develops a crush on a pretty wardrobe girl (Emma Watson), but soon abandons her for the glittery charms of Marilyn, who seizes upon him when Miller (Dougray Scott, hammering on the one note of "tortured writer") flees to New York City so he can write. Colin and Marilyn become close, and although we see how Marilyn can seduce and cast aside various amenable men with what Olivier calls her "little-girl-lost" routine, he is smitten. He is 23 years old, and Marilyn is not only the most famous woman in the world, she is the consensus choice as sexiest.

This framing story of a young man's crush on an unattainable celebrity -- unattainable not because she is so distant, but because she is so available -- seems flimsy in the presence of so much star power. As in real life, Marilyn Monroe extracts all the air from the room, and director Simon Curtis surrenders to her luminescence. This is a showcase performance and Williams gets it all: the walk, the voice, the soft eyes, the whole candle-in-the-wind thing. She doesn't look entirely like Marilyn Monroe, but she is so persuasive that you end up, as so many did, falling in love with the image.

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